


The Kind

by TenSpencerRiedPlease



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Related, F/M, Feels, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Natasha Needs a Hug, POV Alternating, Protective Natasha, Tony Being Tony, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 13:44:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5588161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TenSpencerRiedPlease/pseuds/TenSpencerRiedPlease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark, from day one, has been special. Crazy smart, crazy risky, crazy self-centered, and crazy alone, he has always existed as the exception to any rule someone put forth. It helped that he hated rules, he understood them sure, but most of them made no sense and so he made his own rule book to play by. </p><p>Natasha Romanoff, from day one, had been special, all her handlers said so. She was a natural born killer or so they said. She excelled from day one, showing ingenuity, creativity, and quick wit far beyond the other Widows. And she was fucking blood thirsty to boot, but Natasha Romanov had never done the second place thing well and if that meant blood on her hands so be it. </p><p>Or: Yet Another Soul Mate AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GoodSourceofFiber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoodSourceofFiber/gifts).



> This includes a lot of canon elements from the first two Iron Man movies and some stuff from some Black Widow comics but this is all AU y'all. 
> 
> Anyways, hope ya enjoy it :)
> 
> Also Natasha's notes on Tony towards the end are from the Iron Man Manuel, not me.

Tony Stark, from day one, has been special. Crazy smart, crazy risky, crazy self-centered, and crazy alone, he has always existed as the exception to any rule someone put forth. It helped that he hated rules, he understood them sure, but most of them made no sense and so he made his own rule book to play by. People didn’t much like it but that was because they were pissed off that no matter what risk he took there was always a reward at the end. Not once, at least professionally, has Tony Stark flopped enormously. Sure, he’s made his fair share of mistakes and he’s had a few unsuccessful prototypes but in the face of such overwhelming success it was hard to look at a near perfect record and complain. His personal life, well, that was lacking considerably but who needed friends when you were a billionaire anyways? Maybe some people thought that connections were necessary, especially those damn soul mate bonds, but Tony Stark played by his own rules and he’d be damned if he would consider himself a half a person because he lacked a soul bond.

*

Natasha Romanoff, from day one, had been special, all her handlers said so. She was a natural born killer or so they said. She excelled from day one, showing ingenuity, creativity, and quick wit far beyond the other Widows. And she was fucking blood thirsty to boot, but Natasha Romanov had never done the second place thing well and if that meant blood on her hands so be it. They were weak, her handlers said, and she was strong. It was natural, they claimed, for the strong to win and the weak to perish. Besides, she was doing good, she was _helping_ and that was important to her and her country. So she continued to detach herself from those around her, even those she had known since childhood, because success had no room for friends and lovers. Success meant loneliness and she had long ago accepted that, embraced it even because she was not a half a person without friends or a soul bond. Natasha Romanov didn’t need someone else to make her happy, happy was for the weak, and besides, she was more than content with her life now. It was hard to look at her success and feel lesser because she didn’t have a soul bond, in her total record she failed three times to many, but she’d been on hundreds of missions varying in importance. She made her own rules and soul bonds were not in her play book.

*

He had never believed the whole soul bond thing anyways, it didn’t even make any sense and science said the same thing. He had read dozens of studies when the mark first appeared, considerably late in his life considering most people were _born_ with a soul mark. Rhodey had informed him that science wouldn’t quantify the bond he and Sam had, it was something beyond the realm of human understanding but Tony didn’t accept that. Everything had and explanation and he wasn’t going to stop until he found one, but he also had a company to run and Obadiah had sent him off to Afghanistan to show off the Jericho bomb, which, not to toot his own horn, was fucking awesome.

The last thing he expected was to be blown up by his own weapon and end up kidnapped by terrorists for fucks sakes. He didn’t have time for that; he had better things to do than play ‘Dunk Tony’ with a bunch of nuts who wanted him to make them a weapon. That, if he had to pin point a moment, with his head underwater and terrorists screaming behind him, was the moment the knowledge started to come. He had read about it, obviously, that some people with soul bonds experienced what the other person was going through, felt their pain, saw their memories, learned their skills all before meeting their apparent one and only. He hadn’t believed it because it didn’t make sense but with his head underwater he randomly acquired the knowledge to not only not drown, but also to fight. It had been considerably surprising to everyone involved when Tony managed to knock five people out in a matter of seconds but as soon as the knowledge was there it was gone and lucky number six probably would have kicked the shit out of Tony if it wasn’t for Yinsen yelling about his heart problems. If they wanted a weapon, he reasoned, they should probably leave the builder intact.

*

When her soul mark showed up, considerably late in life given that most people were born with one, she did her research. Nothing she read indicated that her mark bore any importance to her or her missions so she chose to ignore it unless it gained relevance. Her handlers asked her how she felt about it, they knew that she had been reading about soul bonds, of course they did. She tells them the same thing she told herself, the mark was irrelevant, nothing scientific even supported that the connections were real, and even brain scans were at a loss. If it wasn’t going to interfere with her work, she told them, there was no reason to dwell on something she believed to be made up. Her handlers had been pleased and she’d been sent off to Afghanistan to assassinate someone of importance.

The last thing she had expected was to pass out from pain she knew wasn’t hers and fall from her hiding spot on a half hidden rickety fire escape into a dumpster. Thankfully she hadn’t been noticed so her mission went on as planned but she reported the abnormality to her handlers immediately. It seemed that her soul bond was something special, most people didn’t experience what their bonded was doing or gain their memories and while her handers thought this was an inconvenience Natasha suspected her soul mate must be important. When she voiced her suspicions she knew her handlers doubted her, assuming she must have grown fond of the idea of a soul mate but that wasn’t true. Something about the pain she had experienced felt targeted to her bonded, and there was a strange lack of fear of attack, instead there had been a simple knowledge that they were fucked.

At the time she didn’t know it but when her handlers caught wind of Tony Stark going missing around the same time Natasha was in Afghanistan they began to suspect Natasha was right. Their suspicions were all but confirmed when they discovered the time of attack matched the pain Natasha experienced almost exactly.

*

The knowledge kept coming and suddenly he knew how to manipulate people in a way he hadn’t know how to before. It was easy to lull the terrorists into a false sense of security, talk them out of examining the armor he was building for himself to get him and Yinsen the fuck out of there. He knew how to handle the torture, hell; he barely even felt the pain of it anymore. Like he was so used to the pain he felt that it was more inevitable than painful. Yinsen had several theories but Tony didn’t bother listening to any of them because he wondered what the hell kind of life his bonded must be living to give him such a… strange subset of knowledge. This was the kind of thing Rhodey dealt with and if it wasn’t for Sam he would have wondered if Rhodey was his soul mate. He’d consider Pep but he was fairly certain she hadn’t spent enough time being tortured and hurt that pain became something normal to her.

Yinsen was just as confused as he was when Tony started gathering medical knowledge that rivaled what Yinsen knew though it was useful when making the mini reactor. When the Ten Rings goons flipped out over it Tony points out that he would be considerably more productive if he didn’t have to carry a battery around with him everywhere, wasting energy. He also assures him that the other projects he had lingering around weren’t distracting him from the work they wanted him to do. Building things generally gave him ideas and when he was stuck on something he tinkered with something else until he came up with an idea that solved the original problem. The terrorists accept this and move on and he goes back to his armor, trying to tailor it to run off the shit tech he was provided with.

*

Natasha questioned things before, of course she did, but not like she did now. Now everything was a mystery to be solved, including things that _were_ solved, and the pursuit of knowledge was near all consuming. It made her far more efficient though and her research skills went through the roof, as did her skill in acquiring good intel. There were other parts of the feelings she had gathered from her bonded that were irritating, like that grandiose sense of self-importance, but after a while even that made sense. She had a better track record than all the other Widows, she was far more efficient than even her handlers, her skill was more than impressive so why shouldn’t she consider herself special? As her sense of self-importance went up she stopped thinking of herself as a gear in a machine, a weapon, and started thinking of herself as a person.

She keeps this from her handlers because suddenly they seemed a lot less trustable, they didn’t understand her, they don’t know her potential, and they have made the mistake of underestimating her. Deferring doesn’t occur to her at first, she’s had it considerably good with her handlers, but as the dreams keep coming she questions why she is here. It occurs to her sometime after the dreams start that her loyalty was never to her handlers, it was to herself. Her own success had been far more important than her handler’s instructions and she full well knew she was capable of success without them and so she started to plan her own escape.

No one even suspected anything was amiss, it was difficult to read the motivations of a master spy after all, and she couldn’t help but think her handlers were idiots for ever thinking this was anything but inevitable. Natasha Romanov did not take second place and as long as she was playing second fiddle to her handlers she wasn’t really winning, now was she?

*

Tony manages to escape with his life, barely, and somehow he knows how to survive in a desert area. Whoever his bonded was they must be used to the kind of punishment his body had been going through recently, but he wasn’t, and so he collapses when he sees the helicopter where his bonded would have stood on guard to fight. It’s Rhodey though, thankfully, and he lets himself get dragged off to safety all the while the instincts from his bonded person told him he needed to stay sharp and watch for danger. He thought he was paranoid but his bonded took it to a whole new level. Every person he came in contact with must have an ulterior motive, must be looking for something, to do something, steal something. He was on guard nearly all the time except with Rhodey, who was unimpressed with the whole weapons thing, and Pepper, whom had been deemed safe pretty much immediately.

In the end he probably shouldn’t have complained too much because that paranoia helped him notice things that were off about Obi, and with Pepper’s help he managed to find out what, exactly, happened to him. He nearly dies battling it out with Obadiah but he wins, marginally, thanks to quick thinking and ingenuity he isn’t sure is his own and for a while the dreams and knowledge stop coming.

*

Natasha was no moron, she knew almost upon sight alone that the American that was trying to take her out was more interested in taking her in than taking her down. She had her suspicions about the guy, people using her for sex wasn’t anything new to her except that it was. _She_ used people by using sex as a weapon, not the other way around, and lately the knowledge from her bonded was starting to become more and more natural to her. She had easily escaped her handlers, killing most of them in her wake but leaving a few to spread the message. Natasha Romanov was not a weapon, she was not something to be controlled, and she would not be used ever again. Eventually the American gets bored of playing games and he tosses the ear piece he was wearing away and walks over to where she was crouched behind a dumpster, grinning.

Clint Barton, she decided, was probably the best thing to have ever happened to her because the guy was _hilarious_. Phil Coulson, Clint’s own soul mate, had simply sighed and taken her in on Clint’s word she was good and somehow the two managed to get her a job. She was suspicious, she was always suspicious, but this agency functioned completely different than the last one she worked for and it was abundantly clear that here she held _value_. Coulson was a great handler, even when she and Clint ignored every order he gave them, and the three quickly bonded.

Before she wasn’t allowed to be her own person, she wasn’t allowed to be happy, to have emotions, to be weak. But Clint and Coulson showed emotion all the time, with everyone and not just each other, and they were strong still. Some of the strongest Natasha had ever known and she realized that she had never been strong like she thought. She was subservient, weak, and looking someone she had considered a friend dead in the eye and pulling the trigger had never been strength. Strength would have been looking the person who gave her that order in the eye and pulling the trigger. It was what Clint would have done, no hesitation. She learns, slowly, to let herself feel things and she starts to use that to her advantage. Her own emotions, she learns, were not a weakness she needed to abolish, in fact emotions were inevitable, like pain, and like pain one needed to learn how to work with them rather than against them.

*

Tony revamps the entire company and a lot of people bail along the way. They were sorry later though; because it took him all of eight months to get the company back on track and in a little over a year business was so good that he had made almost all the money he lost back again. Once again people were pissed off that such a huge risk had paid off for him in the end, especially Hammer, but Tony had always loved the haters. It was so strangely pleasing to him, Pepper didn’t understand that whatsoever but she was damn good at her job and she rolled with the punches. His new lease on life comes with its own complications, like Agent following him around everywhere with a charming smile that he seemed to think was going to get him access to Tony’s knowledge. Haha, no.

The other slight complication was that he was just a little bit dying and there was nothing he could do about it. He keeps that to himself even though he knows that Pepper and Rhodey were worried about his increasingly erratic behavior. There was no need to make them worry more than necessary and even though Pep doesn’t say it he knows she’s glad that he handed his company over to her because he was sure she thought it was only a matter of time before he ruined that too.

He notices Pepper’s new assistant, obviously, it was hard to miss someone that gorgeous and even if he had by some miracle missed her face he sure as hell would have noticed her kick Happy’s ass. “I want one,” he says again and Pepper gives him a look.

“No, Tony,” she tells him firmly.

“But Pepper, she has murder thighs. I need them,” he says with conviction.

Pepper looks largely unimpressed, “no you don’t, and you have better things to do than ogle my assistant so go do them,” she tells him, her tone letting him know that he was dismissed.

“But-” he starts but Pepper cuts him off.

“ _Now_ , Tony,” she tells him, shooing him away.

“For the record she’d make one badass body guard, just saying,” he says as he leaves the room, glancing back to find Happy picking himself up off the floor looking dazed. Natalie looks over to him and for a second Tony _swears_ she gives him a calculating look but as soon as he notices it its gone so he figures maybe he was seeing things.

*

Coulson was terrible at getting Tony Stark to do things but Natasha was used to getting men to do what she wanted and impressing Pepper Potts had been surprisingly easy. Pepper also happened to be something of a slave driver for a boss, she expected the best and settled for nothing less. Natasha liked her. She’s dropping off some paper work for Pepper when she first meets Tony, sort of, as they pass by and she’s unsurprised to find he stares, turning around to do so. Coulson wasn’t lying when he said that Stark knew nothing of subtly. She ignores him though because a guy like that got everything he wanted at his every waking whim, he liked a challenge, which was why he pushed boundaries so much. Her job was to figure out how far, exactly, he was willing to push those boundaries and if S.H.I.E.L.D needed to worry about him.

Thus far she had concluded that he was a loose cannon, reckless and stupid, no self-preservation, no sense of _other_ people’s preservation. Tony Stark would do whatever it is that he wanted to do and that in itself was dangerous, factor in how incredibly successful he was at doing whatever he wanted he was that much more of a problem. She turns to listen to the conversation Pepper and Tony were having, ignoring Hogan because he was no threat to her, when he decides it was a good idea to teach her something by hurting her first, teaching her later. It was far too reminiscent of the Red Room for her and she grabs his hand on instinct, forcing it to the side and swinging her body up gracefully, clasping his head between her thighs and taking him down to the ground.

Happy lets out a few pathetic squeaking noises, tapping her thigh to get her to free him, and she ignores him for a second to listen to Tony’s words. He looks impressed with her skill and desire was clearly written across his attractive features, but something else was there too. She deems it unimportant and frees Hogan, who crawls away gasping and she is already on her feet walking back over to Pepper for further instruction on what she was to do. Pepper looks unimpressed but Natasha is certain she was unimpressed with Happy not her and when she gives her more instructions her tone confirms it.

Her initial assumption that Tony Stark was a loose cannon may have been off. The man was an outright menace and he needed to be eliminated immediately before he ended up killing himself and everyone around him with his reckless behavior. The only saving grace to the disaster that was his birthday party, she couldn’t believe people clapped at the guy wetting himself in front of a crowd, was that he was stupid enough to let her use his armor. It was impressive to say the least and even without the rest of the suit the gauntlet worked just fine with minimal blowback. Certainly transferable technology, Clint would _love_ playing around with this. Coulson probably wouldn’t let him because with his luck Clint would try and make a new doorway with repulsor tech instead of doing it properly.

Tony, at some point, slinks off from the crowd and she follows though she doesn’t make herself known right away. He spends far too much time in the bathroom to be considered normal and initially she assumes he’s on drugs, it really wouldn’t surprise her, but his behavior didn’t suggest he had taken anything. She decides then to make herself known and instead of making some gross comment like she was expecting he gives her a surprisingly sober look considering he was wasted, “if this was the last birthday party you were ever going to get what would you do?” he asks.

She tips her head up defiantly, “whatever I want with whoever I want,” she says boldly and even then Tony doesn’t make a gross sexual comment, instead the man wanders off to continue to make a fool of himself. She needed to recalculate his behavior immediately because something was off and she couldn’t make a proper assessment without all the information.

*

So maybe he had a problem, it wasn’t that bad, he had only almost killed himself and Rhodey not to mention destroyed his mansion.

Alright so that was a total lie, if he never saw the look on Rhodey’s and Pepper’s faces the morning after his disastrous party it would be too soon. He had fucked up big this time and he wasn’t sure he could come back from it.

He wasn’t even sure he cared, not really. Why bother trying to make it up to them if he was only going to die anyways? He might as well leave them pissed off at him for being a fucking idiot, they weren’t wrong, but they acted like it was the first time they had ever noticed how much of a raging asshole he was. It wasn’t as if he’s never done this before, well, the suit was new, but drinking too much and making a fool of himself was ‘normal’ behavior for him so why does it matter now? He was being bitter and trying to lay blame where it didn’t belong and he knew it but he didn’t care.

He was going to die.

After having survived Howard, living in the business world, his own mental health issues, terrorists, Obadiah, literal war zones, and coming back from those war zones he was going to be killed by his own inventions. It was like some sort of fucking poetic justice, use inventions he thought were good to kill him because he had used inventions he thought were good to kill other people. He deserved it, he knew, and no matter how much he didn’t want to he would accept his fate but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

Briefly he had given thought to whomever was on the other end of the soul bond but whoever they were they weren’t being poisoned by an unknown force, he’s spent a lot of time trying to find anyone admitted into some hospital with the same symptoms he had. So far nothing, which was at least good. The last thing he needed to do was drag someone else down with him.

He hadn’t expected Natalie to show up at his house, after being stuck firmly on house arrest thanks to his own stupidity, with a bottle of wine. “I’m about eighty percent sure the last thing I need is alcohol,” he says.

She raises an eyebrow, “only eighty percent?” she asks.

“I’m twenty percent tempted,” he quips and she surprises him by smiling. He isn’t sure _why_ but he assumed she was not the type to smile a lot and the smile currently on her features looked genuine. He knew a fake smile when he saw one; he saw them all the time on people who wanted his money and in the mirror.

“Well fret not, there’s no alcohol in it,” she says and pushes past him into his house. At least he mostly fixed the damage he had caused, a side effect of being bored out of his mind on house arrest, and he was perfectly welcome to this new distraction.

“Aw. Then what’s the point?” he asks, purposefully sounding whiney.

She smiles at him again, “mostly to avoid property damage,” she tells him, “and we can pretend to be drunk, that might be fun.”

He considers it for a second and shrugs, “hell yeah, let’s pretend to be a bunch of idiots. I don’t even have to change anything,” he says.

“Oh I’m not sure about that, you might have made a few mistakes but you are a genius. That armor alone is a fantastic display of your intelligence let alone everything else you’ve done,” she says, padding quietly after him to his lab. He had a bunch of shit set up there that S.H.I.E.L.D had sent over, including some home videos of his assfuck of a father. He had been watching one when JARVIS had informed him that someone was on their way up to the house so he had paused the video so he could go greet them.

Natalie wanders over to the screen where Howard had been praising Tony only seconds before, not that Tony believed a word he had said, and she seems to ignore Howard, instead looking past him to the small child who’s head barely cleared the table he was looking at. Tony remembered that day pretty well actually, he had heard Howard say his name in a tone that he didn’t hear often from the man so he had gone in to investigate, also there was the table. Howard had yelled at him to get out, calling for his mother to retrieve him from the room. He was pretty sure he remembered that day in particular because his mother had told him that Howard loved him, in his own way, he just acted the way he did because he didn’t know how to show it.

It didn’t matter because Tony didn’t appreciate the abusive behavior.

“Is that you?” Natalie asks, gesturing to little him peeking over the edge of the table.

“Yeah. I’m about to get kicked out,” he says in a tone that was far more bitter than he had intended.

Natalie frowns, “didn’t have a good relationship with your father, then?” she asks.

He shrugs, “I don’t think anyone did, not really. Except some guy named Steve that he’d go on and on and on about, if he wasn’t such a homophobic fuckbag I’d assume he was in love with the guy,” he says.

Natalie snickers, “sounds like a pleasure,” she says, smiling at him.

“Oh yeah, he real fucking peach, the day he died was the best damn day of my life. Not that you care,” he throws in when he realizes he was laying way too much on the new girl, “sorry.”

*

Tony was far more open than she had expected him to be, probably another symptom of his recklessness. She shrugs, “its fine. I know a thing or two about shitty parents,” she says, not that her parents had been terrible. They were dead now, had been for some time as she was an orphan, but her replacement parents, if you could call them that, had likely been far worse than whatever Tony suffered. And he had suffered, she could see it in the circles under his eyes, the tired lines of his face, the man looked ready to die and that conflicted with everything she knew about him.

“Isn’t that unfortunate,” he mumbles, “if I did anything half assed I’d take a drink but I decided to quit and there’s no takesies backsies,” he says and she unexpectedly laughs. _Genuinely_ laughs and that was pretty rare for her. Usually only Clint managed but that statement was so absurd that she just had to laugh at it.

“Sorry,” she says when she manages to regain control, “you just said that in a really serious tone and that totally conflicted with the childish nature of your words,” she says, for a second sounding far more like Natasha than Natalie. She needed to get ahold of herself.

Tony grins, “glad someone finds my quick wit and charm amusing,” he says. The two settle and Natasha begins on working information out of Tony, which turns out to be crazy easy, but none of it was the information she wanted. He was happy to give her details of his friendships, all two of them, and his lovers, which entered numbers that were high even by her standards, and all of his inventions. It surprised her that he didn’t treat her as if she was stupid, she expected he would at least in regards to tech, but he didn’t talk down to her once. Instead he talked to her as if she already knew what he was talking about and when she decided to test how far that went and she asked questions he still didn’t treat her as if she was stupid. When she points this out he tells her that Pepper hired her for a reason, he assumed that she knew her shit and he generally only talked down on people that talked down on him.

Apparently he didn’t like to be condescending to people unless they rubbed him the wrong way. As volatile as Tony was she saw little evidence of it in their conversation, instead noting that he seemed… defeated. When she asks about that she watches his walls go up and he regards her with a guarded expression, “I’m not blind,” she points out, “and even if I was your self-destructive behavior is impossible to miss. So what made all this,” she gestures to the room around her, “happen?”

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting but she didn’t expect him to start unbuttoning his shirt, “I’m not being weird,” he says, “okay well I am but not in a creepy way.” He opens his shirt and reveals the miniaturized arc reactor, only the area around it was surrounded by small black veins that seemed to extend from the piece of tech.

“What the hell is that?” she asks, wandering closer to get a better look at it.

“This,” Tony says, “is the thing that was supposed to save my life killing me. Guess I kind of have it coming,” he mumbles.

She looks up from the reactor and tilts her head to the side, feeling the strange urge to protect him. “What makes you think that?” she asks.

Tony gives her a look, “you aren’t a stupid woman, don’t play like you are. You full well know what I’m like, what I’m capable of, what I’ve _done_ ,” he says meaningfully, “anyone who gets nicknamed ‘Merchant of Death’ deserves to die.” He says that with more fire and passion in his features than he had seen throughout the entire conversation they had had and that pisses her off for some reason.

“So what?” she asks angrily, “you’re going to give up? Stop feeling sorry for yourself, get off your ass, and do something about the fact that you’re dying, and while you’re at it tell your friends so they can stop worrying,” she snaps.

Tony’s eyes flash with anger, “you think I haven’t tried? I’ve gone through every element there is, nothing is a viable replacement,” he tells her.

“Then make something, you’re Tony fucking Stark, you make things out of nothing all the time, you made _that_ ,” she nods to the reactor, “out of nothing so do it again. The best weapon you have is your intelligence and instead of using it in every way you can you just give up and act like a child with a drinking permit? What the hell is wrong with you?” she yells, shaking with fury she had no right to feel.

 _Why_ was she so angry? She had no idea; just that it was time to go ten minutes ago.

*

He didn’t exactly expect Pepper’s redheaded pitbull to try and eat him and frankly he was a little pissed off about it. It wasn’t like she knew anything about his life, the reactor, what the hell made her think that he could just make shit up? He didn’t like rules but there were rules even he had to follow, like the laws of fucking physics that dictated that making shit up wasn’t generally feasible. At least not the way she was suggesting. Before he can start an argument though she’s gone and he’s left alone with his thoughts and a half empty bottle of not-wine.

For an hour he stews in Natalie bullshit before he decides that at the very least he needed to make things up to Pepper and Rhodey so he sneaks out of the mansion, which was surprisingly easy, and makes his way to SI.

So it had turned out that Pepper and strawberries went together because she was allergic to them but he tried, really, even if she didn’t seem to want to deal with him at that moment. Frankly he understood and then accidentally broke her desk thingy before wandering elsewhere in her office, formerly his office. When he finds the boards that made up the previous Stark Expo layout he frowns at it for a minute because it looked too… familiar.

 _Make something out of nothing_.

It was a testament to how weird he must have acted on a regular basis that no one reacted when he carried the three large boards that made up the Stark Expo design out to his car. One of the janitors offered to help but other than that not one person batted an eye and now he was curious as to what made that so normal to them.

He forgets about Pepper and Rhodey entirely and for three weeks he buries himself in his work, following Natalie’s advice and making something out of nothing. Sometime later it occurs to him that he was really hungry and he remembers that the last time he ate was almost three days prior to finishing the element when Dummy brought him toast and almost ruined Tony’s work with it.

*

Tony emerges from the lab at last and Natasha has decided the jig was up anyways, she had gotten the information that she had needed and now she was in charge of making sure he didn’t do anything stupid until S.H.I.E.L.D sorted this suit mess out. Tony did not react very well at all and even though it was nearly a day since he had discovered she was a spy he was still grumpy about it.

“Give it up, Stark,” she tells him when he goes to try and run away from her general presence yet again.

Tony whirls around, “no, I will not ‘give it up’! I gave you some very personal information!” he says, looking and sounding betrayed.

“That’s your own fault,” she says bluntly, “if you didn’t want anyone to have that information you should have kept your mouth shut.” It was as simple as that though Tony obviously didn’t think so.

“Oh way to blame the victim,” he says, hand over his arc reactor looking greatly offended.

“You’re no victim, Tony, except to your own ego. Just for the record, Stark, just because I was a spy didn’t mean I was playing you. A good liar knows that the best way to lie is to tell the truth, I never deceived you and you know it, which is why you’re so pissed off,” she tells him. The only thing worse than someone who was playing you the whole time was someone who wasn’t, but was good enough that they could have been and you’d never know.

*

Tony is pretty sure neither of them were expecting to find out in the middle of a S.H.I.E.L.D meeting in which Tony ended up being employed as a consultant for the organization. Natasha had decided he was too volatile for any sort of work outside of that. Actually she had written, and this was a quote, ‘textbook narcissism: Stark exhibits self-obsessed tendencies and seems unable to focus on the needs or problems of others, except through the lens of his own powerful personality. Not a team player.’ Fuck her; he was so a team player, he just played for his own team. Team Tony. Which, in his not narcissistic opinion, was the best team thank her very much.

Also it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t take the stupid S.H.I.E.L.D interview seriously, they kept asking stupid questions and he had better things to do. And what was wrong with ‘following’s not my style’? It wasn’t his style, he never had been good with authority and it served him damn well, excuse Natasha and her spy mojo.

He had been toying with his watch, which was a useless piece of junk honestly; he only wore the thing to cover the small hourglass on the inside of his wrist to avoid fake soul mates, when Natasha grabs his wrist. “What is that?” she asks, forcing him to keep still, eyes zeroed in on the little hourglass that was mostly exposed.

He pulls his hand back, “none of your damn business,” he snaps at her. He wipes his wrist off on his jacket full well knowing he was being childish but he didn’t give a damn. His words didn’t seem to matter anyways because Natasha seemed to be putting pieces he didn’t have together and that just pissed him off more. Who gave her the right?

“Shit,” she mumbles and stands up, undoing her pants and Tony lets out a snort.

“Oh no, you had your chance to be cute and do a strip tease and you yelled at me to live instead, and then you write this shit about me,” he says, waving the offending folder of Tony’s assessment around. First off how were they going to have Iron Man tech with no Tony Stark? No one would even know what to do with it except Natasha, who spied her way into his gauntlet. God, he wished that was a euphemism for sex. At least that would have been pleasant and less hurt-y later.

“Shut up, Tony,” she says and shimmies her pants down. It was a testament to both how much respect Natasha held here and how terrifying she must be in action that everyone currently populated the room looked away, including Tony. “Oh my god turn back around you twit, you need to see this,” she tells him.

He sticks his nose in the air, “I need to see no such- ahh _hhh_ ,” he says, rudely interrupted by Natasha grabbing him and all but shoving his face in her crotch.

“Okay _first_ of all,” he starts, prepared to go on a long rant about how creepy that was but then he spots the bobbin on the insider of her thigh, “is that a bobbin?” he asks, squinting at the offending mark and wondering about its relevance to him.

“No you moron, it’s an arc reactor,” she snaps.

“Well it isn’t the latest model so I don’t accept it,” he says and Natasha smacks the palm of her head to his forehead, “oww, that’s violent,” he mumbles. One of the other agents, a blonde fucker with a thing for Agent, snickers at him and Agent bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

“The hourglass on our wrist, it’s the Widow’s symbol. My symbol,” she says.

He rolls his eyes in an impressively dramatic manner, “I don’t care,” he says.

“I wouldn’t either if I didn’t get all the shitty overflow from your crap personality. If I wanted trash I’d go hang out in the dumpster with Clint, keep it to yourself,” she snaps.

“Fine, you keep all your weird combat moves and shit to yourself, I’m tired of being in the middle of some good sex and then having like twelve ways to kill the person underneath of me pop into my head, it’s a boner killer,” he snaps back.

This is blondie’s breaking point and he starts laughing. “Oh now I’m going to send you all the boner killing things, like mental pictures of your father naked, we have pictures here!” she yells.

“Fine!” he yells back, “then I’ll send all my trash personality to you and you’ll be a trash bag too!”

Agent loses it at this point and neither Natasha nor Tony think this is funny because they’re glaring at each other and honestly this was really, _really_ weird. “Am I the only one who’s strangely turned on right now?” she asks quietly and on my _god_ he was too, what is wrong with him?

“Yes,” he lies and Natasha gives him a look, “don’t look at me like that,” he says, “I’m telling the truth.”

“You are not, why are you lying when you know that I’ll know that you’re not telling the truth?” she asks, frustrated with him.

“You know what, you’re not wearing pants so I feel no need to take you seriousl- oww, stop hitting me it’s illegal,” he whines.

“You know what else should be illegal? People clapping at a grown man wetting his tin can,” she says.

“There’s a filtration system you savage, I didn’t just piss myself! Wait, which model was that, maybe I did…” he mumbles and aww. Well, at least people clapped. He had good luck with these things; people thought he was great even when he was not great at all.

Agent claps his hands together, “you’re perfect together!” he declares, looking utterly smitten with them.

“No we aren’t,” they say in sync.

*

They remain skittish to each other for months and every meeting they have ends up in a petty argument over something stupid and the blonde, Clint, thought it was fantastic. Finally they learn that Clint and Agent weren’t going to give up so they resigned themselves to just sitting there while Natasha stews over being Tony’s babysitter and Tony stews over having a babysitter. They discover they both love America’s Next Top Model, Gordon Ramsey, and watching interviews with Tony and mocking the show interviewer.

And it was _not_ narcissistic to watch his own videos.

Maybe reading the fanfic was too much but come on, people dedicated time and effort to writing about him he might as well indulge in the guilty pleasure. Natasha thought the fanfics were great too so she couldn’t even complain.

They’re sitting on opposite ends of the couch watching T.V while Clint and Agent linger somewhere watching and texting each other cute things about Natasha and Tony refusing to interact when Natasha speaks. “Thanks for the blow job tips,” she says finally and Tony gives her a confused look. She sighs, “it was like… forever ago now, but I’m on this mission, right, and this dick, literal dick not metaphorical. Anyways I was looking the one eyed monster straight in the eye, and I had no clue what to do with it. You had plenty of ideas and congrats, they worked, basically in seconds,” she says, “so thanks.”

Tony sticks his nose in the air stiffly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about but obviously I am an expert,” he says. Natasha snorts but doesn’t refute the obvious truth of his genius.

They go back to silence and Tony decides that maybe he shouldn’t be such a petty d-bag and he throws Natasha a bone. “Thanks for teaching me how to kick ass, it totally worked for like three seconds when I got kidnapped by those terrorists. I mean the sixth one almost killed me but the first five hit the ground and that was pretty sweet,” he says.

She sits quietly for a minute or so before she responds, “thanks for being so suspicious of anything that tries to control you. I would have come to the same conclusions myself eventually, but my last handlers were terrible people and your inability to trust authority helped in breaking the conditioning they had put me through,” she says quietly.

They end up talking about the shared memories, the disbelief they both still had of the soul mate thing, why their marks showed up so late in life, how they were going to exact petty revenge on Clint and Agent, whose name was apparently Phil Coulson. He didn’t care what Agent’s name was he was forever Agent now. He had no choice.

*

Rhodey thought a double date was a good idea. It was not but at least Sam was having a blast. Taking Tony out anywhere was bound to end in disaster but adding Natasha to the mix only seemed to up the chances of that happening. Tony had always been a special snow flake so Rhodey was generally unsurprised to find that he and Natasha had shared memories and such before meeting, what he didn’t expect was the irritating telepathic link the two had and used to torment each other.

“For gods sakes Natasha, stop sending me mental pictures of trash cans and thinking ‘you’ at me,” Tony says, looking fondly annoyed.

Natasha grins until Tony sent her something back and she looks greatly offended, “oh come on, I sent you recycling bins, you didn’t have to come after me like that,” she says.

Sam leans forward eagerly, “come after you like what?” he asks, fully engrossed in Tony and Natasha’s drama. The man absolutely thrived off drama, so long as it didn’t involve him, and Rhodey was firmly convinced he should have gone into politics. All the drama and the world could use another black man in power. Also Sam was an absolute sweetheart, Rhodey would totally vote for him.

“He sent me a mental image of a squished black widow spider captioned ‘you’,” she says, feigning offense.

Sam gasps and Natasha takes this as a confirmation that she was, in fact, correct and Tony now needed to apologize. Tony snorts and apparently sends her a mental image of bug spray, and Natasha responds with a deconstructed Iron Man suit that leaves Tony entirely way too offended. The two bicker back and forth, out loud and in their heads, and Rhodey is left exhausted just looking at them but they do, at least, seem to get along in a really weird way.

At least Tony finally gave up being mad about the spy thing, if nothing else Rhodey was happy he wasn’t getting phone calls at three a.m starting with, “and _another_ thing,” anymore. Also Natasha seemed to have wrangled Tony into a somewhat regular eating schedule, mostly because he warped her sleep schedule so much and she was not in the habit of being hungry or feeling Tony’s hunger. The best thing that Tony had done for Natasha, as far as Rhodey knew, was convince her that she could eat twelve jalapeño peppers in a row. It turned out she could, which resulted in her challenging Tony, who managed one and a half before he started whining and crying about it. She deemed Tony a wimp and he happily took the title before trying to down a gallon of milk. Sam thought the whole thing was hilarious and Rhodey was stuck long suffering over his best friend and his soul mate bickering about everything.

The puns alone were bad enough for them both to owe him an apology for making his ears listen to that shit.

*

She and Tony, Natasha thinks, seem to have come to some sort of agreement that they can think the soul mate thing was total shit while still kind of liking each other. She still thought he was a narcissistic dick bag, but he was a fun narcissistic dick bag. She was pretty sure she still thought she was an asshole spy, but he also seemed to enjoy her company. Honestly nothing was better than the look on Pepper Pott’s face when she walked into Tony’s apartment in Stark Tower to find the two of them dressed in red dinosaur onesies singing along to Hamilton songs loudly. Or, even better, the defeated look of Rhodey’s face as he walked in on the two of them trying desperately to beat one another at dance dance revolution by trying to shove each other off the pads. Tony ended up slipping and she was so pissed because the two of them slamming down on Tony’s mat had landed him the winner. Tony still lorded it over her.

After a while they had even ended up with a cat that Tony had come home with and all but tossed at her, declaring its name was ‘the better Pepper Potts’ before running off to his lab. Sam thought this was hilarious, Pepper and Rhodey had let out long sighs, and Natasha had firmly told the cat that it was not to enter any room during sex.

At the end of the day things had ended mostly well aside from some nightmare issues, and the two spent most evenings curled up on the couch together watching some meaningless junk. They do, however, almost always get interrupted by one Pepper Potts looking to harass Tony about paper work.

Today, though, she pauses and examines the two, sitting beside one another, Tony’s legs balanced on the table and Natasha’s draped over top. “Are… are you wearing Gucci heels with a dinosaur onesie?” she asks, giving Natasha’s current fashion statement a questioning look.

Personally she thought that Tony should have caused the stuffy redhead more pause considering he was a grown man dressed in a Pikachu onesie with a tail and ears to match. Tony grins, “yeah, isn’t she the _best_ ,” he says with conviction.

Pepper looks horrified.                                                                 


End file.
